As a wireless service to mobile users, the transmission of multimedia is becoming as important as voice connectivity. It is forecasted that multimedia applications will include interactive data services such as gaming and internet access as well as on-demand video and audio services.
Digital video and audio broadcasting and multicasting are one class of wireless services. Some applications such as news-casting, sports-casting, and other types of multimedia entertainment require no or minimum interaction. The most efficient way to deliver these types of mass multimedia contents is broadcasting. Given these broadband wireless applications, the platform for the next generation wireless communications should deliver interactive data and broadcasting services at the same time. The design of such a platform with mixed applications must be well balanced, optimizing quality of service, efficiency, power consumption by mobile stations, etc.
A mobile station in continuous reception of a video broadcasting stream consumes significant amount of power, which becomes even a bigger challenge if the mobile station is running on battery. Furthermore, when data application traffic shares the same air link resource with the video streams, a video burst that utilizes the entire air link resource will cause a long delay for other applications such as for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). This can become a major problem if some control data transmissions require swift responses, such as power control, hybrid automatic retransmission request (HARQ) feedback and channel quality information (CQI) measurement reports. The exclusive use of a resource for video broadcasting blocks these control messages and causes system performance problems.